"Dad said we'd know if Mom was having a kid because she'd look like a hippopotamus with a gland problem."
— Calvin, Calvin and Hobbes
One of the characters is pregnant. Right around the time she learns she's pregnant, she gets as big as a house - even if she learns almost immediately after conception. It's Rule of Perception - we can't be sure she's pregnant unless she's showing, can we?
There are other signs as well, ways to tell us that her increased size is due to pregnancy and not simple weight gain. Strangely enough, this will probably include eating, if only the classic ice cream sundae with pickles. She may have morning sickness soon after she learns she's pregnant, depending on the stomachs of the creators, but this rarely lasts. She will get moody.
Often accompanies But I Can't Be Pregnant! or But We Used a Condom!. Sometimes used to accompany an actress's real-life pregnancy, which may account for some of the size so soon.
The opposite is Hide Your Pregnancy or My Secret Pregnancy.
Examples:
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Anime & Manga
- In Hell Teacher Nube, chapter #220 ("Izuna Becomes A Mother!?"), the greedy amateur exorcist Izuna Hazuki dispels a weak cat Henge who is haunting a full-term pregnant mother, but accidentally displaces her Boze (the spirit of her unborn child), which promptly takes refuge inside of Izuna in order to shelter from youkai known as Boze-Eaters, causing her to look ready to give birth herself. Given what Boze-Eaters look like
, it's not surprising that the poor baby's soul refuses to leave Izuna until one shows up and scares it so badly it flees from person to person, each of whom looks heavily pregnant while possessed as well, and Izuna ultimately goes Mama Bear to protect it.
- In Doctor Slump, this not only happens to Midori Yamabuki but is actually lampshaded when Senbei promptly freaks out over her apparently abnormal development and gives her medical examinations to see if there's something strange going on. Well... stranger than usual, anyway.
- Averted in the 3rd OVA to Fushigi Yuugi. Mayo is at best barely showing. Justified as the pregnancy was transferred supernaturally from Miaka to Mayo, and Miaka was only 3 months along.
- Cowboy Bebop subverts this in the first episode, "Asteroid Blues", when it turns out that the apparently super-pregnant Catalina had a fake belly where she was hiding many drug capsules.
Comic Books
- The DC Comics Chinese "super-functionary" Mother of Champions from Great Ten lives this trope. Then again, her metahuman power is the ability to conceive, safely carry and deliver inhumanly large litters of children (up to twenty-five babies in one pregnancy), and a secondary power is that gestation, from conception to birth, takes only three days.
- In The Thrawn Trilogy comics, this is both used and averted. Leia Organa Solo is pregnant until fairly early in the third book. In Heir to the Empire this isn't exactly evident, even when she's in basically a bra and panties. In Dark Force Rising, she's showing. Explicitly said to be a month later, in The Last Command she's very pregnant before she gives birth. Part of this can be chalked up to the fact that each book was penciled by a new artist.
- Ultimate Marvel: Hela, after Thor knocked her up as part of their deal. Made more obvious by her Stripperific outfit. Somewhat justified by the fluid nature of time in the underworld — even though Thor thought the conception had only happened the night before, enough time has passed in the afterlife that Hela is already in her last trimester.
Fan Works
- In the Total Drama story, Legacy, Heather is almost eight months pregnant. This causes her some trouble in getting out from behind the steering wheel of her car.
- In Star Wars: A Lost Hope, a parody trailer for Revenge of the Sith, Padme announces to Anakin, "I'm preggers!" Anakin replies, "How do you know?" - seemingly oblivious to what looks like a gigantic beachball under Padme's clothes.
- Infinity Train: Crown of Thorns wastes no time stating Burnet's pregnant with Kukui's kid, with Acerola immediately calling it out because of her baby bump, and how she has a Hand on Womb. Of course, with Ash being in Alola at the moment, there's a couple bets for how long it might take him to notice.
Film - Animated
- In The Emperor's New Groove, Chicha is obviously pregnant, and the first pregnant woman to be shown onscreen in a Disney film.
Live Action TV
- Inverted on Charmed with Piper's first pregnancy, where people started complaining she took too long to show. Piper's second pregnancy goes right from conception to six months (to accommodate Holly Marie Combs' pregnancy)
- On Scrubs, Jordan blew up at only four months, and later in one of JD's fantasies ate an entire goat as a Shout-Out to Jurassic Park.
- As a Running Gag on The Cosby Show, Dr. Huxtable's patients frequently included pregnant women who'd dreamed of lashing out at their husbands.
- Janice on Heroes, though the actress was pregnant in Real Life. It was a total coincidence that they got the idea for the character around the time she was starting to show...
- That must be the case for many long running shows, such as soaps.
- On ER, the pregnancies of two actresses were incorporated into the show. Problem is, both actresses were quite far along at a point where their TV pregnancies hadn't even been disclosed or discovered, so both of them still had to conceal their developing tummies until this time.
- Averted in Glee. Quinn spends the entirety of the first season pregnant and is barely showing for quite a while. Even when she does grow, she does slowly and it isn't until the last few episodes when her baby bump is very prominent.
- It could have just been that we'd skipped ahead a month or two, but on Stargate Universe, an episode or two after T.J. reveals she's pregnant, she goes from not showing at all to obviously pregnant, then stays at that size until that plotline wraps up.
- Same thing happens earlier with Teyla on Stargate Atlantis, but this is largely because they had been hiding Rachel Luttrel's real life pregnancy for quite a while by that point.
- Averted with Scully's pregnancy on The X-Files, who didn't show until after the teaser in "Deadalive", roughly seven months into her pregnancy. Before that, there were scenes of her noticing the change in her body, but it wasn't noticeable to anyone else. She successfully hides her pregnancy from everyone (except Skinner) for months.
- Averted on Degrassi: The Next Generation with Liberty, who reveals her pregnancy when she's three months along and doesn't really start showing until she's about six months along. Even then, she was a realistic size, she didn't suddenly get as big as a house.
- Jenna actually starts showing a few weeks before she finds out she's pregnant (at first, she thinks she's just getting fat). However, this is justified — she doesn't realize she's pregnant until she's six months along.
- On Nurses, Gina is late for work again because she's seeing a doctor for treatment of a "rash". Another nurse scoffs, "Who does she think she's kidding? Everyone knows she's pregnant." Gina promptly walks in, hugely pregnant. The other nurses play along, asking how her appointment went. Gina feebly claims, "I think the swelling went down" before finally confessing that she's pregnant, much to everyone's "surprise".
- Saturday Night Live:
- Amy Poehler famously performed the 30th season for the entirety of her first pregnancy, with her eventually massive baby bump getting worked into sketches and only leaving when she was literally hours from delivery.
- An intermediate bit had a very pregnant Maya Rudolph being assured by Lorne Michaels that she was barely showing.
Video Games
- In the last few seconds of the ending cutscene for First Encounter Assault Recon 2: Project Origins, Alma is shown heavily pregnant, even though the "conception" occurred only seconds ago. Then again, this is possibly a psionic projection and thus her immediate development could be an illusion she is using to show her unwilling lover that she has become pregnant.
- In the final episode of Sam & Max: The Devil's Playhouse, Sybil Pandemik returns from her honeymoon sporting one of these. She had been gone for nearly a year of in-game time, at least.
- In Street Fighter IV, Ken's wife Eliza when she gives birth to Mel.
- In The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, Rusl's wife Uli in Ordon Village is very visibly pregnant with her second child. The game's ending montage shows that she has given birth.
- The Sims 4: Sims that get a positive result on a pregnancy test immediately start showing a belly that grows over the next two in-game days. Sims that don't take a test won't start showing until the day after the "Woohoo" that got them pregnant.
Webcomics
- Amy from Sabrina Online gets pregnant in February 1997, but due to the fact that the comic is only updated once a month, the progression of time is slowed down a lot (she doesn't go into labor until October 1999 and the baby isn't delivered until December). In August 1998, the artist apparently got bored of easing into it and jumped straight into making her very visually pregnant.◊ Lampshaded in the strip.
- In Wooden Rose, Nessa's pregnacy is blatantly obvious, making the doctor say she must be four months pregnant and causing Lillian to exclaim that she hadn't known him that long. However, her pregnancy reaches full term in a week.
- Invoked in Goblin Hollow: the goblins are surprised, but that's because they haven't noticed it's been eight months.
- In Doc Rat, number two is on the way.
- In Drowtales Zala'ess shows up with a very visible belly despite appearing a few chapters before with no such sign of it. It turns out she was never actually pregnant to begin with, and was invoking this trope as a trick against Quain'tana, whose own infertility is a sore point.
- In the webcomic, Hominids Zona was shown to have an extremely large and rounded pregnancy bump from chapter 6 onwards.
- In the webcomic, Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan both Kel and Ragna were shown to have an extremely large and rounded pregnancy bump each from the chapter The Corby Clan until the chapter which feature the birth of their babies.
- Stand Still, Stay Silent: Aino, who appears in the Distant Prologue. According to a conversation with her sister-in-law, the baby is expected to show up in the next few weeks. While never seen being born, the baby is implied to have had a long an healthy life in the main story, where three of the main characters are Aino's great-grandchildren.
- Guilded Age: Payet leaves behind many women in this condition. Jerkass.
- Averted in L's Empire. Daisy never shows any signs of pregnancy during the entire run of the comic since the whole thing takes place during her first trimester.
- Justified in Robin's pregnancy in Shortpacked!: since Robin has Super-Speed, her pregnancy from conception to birth only lasts about a month. (Having triplets isn't helping.) It's averted in Amber's case, though.
Western Animation
- Averted in Archer. Lana is apparently pregnant by the end of the fourth season, but this is meant to be a surprise to both the other characters and us, the audience. The episode where she actually reveals this drops little hints here and there, but based on the timeline, her pregnancy would have to have began quite some time before then. The next season plays this trope straight when she's very obviously showing.
- Family Guy: Based on her size, Bonnie is likely in her third trimester by the time she makes her first appearance. It takes seven whole seasons before the writers finally let her give birth.
- Subverted with Luann on King of the Hill who never showed until the episode where she gave birth.
- Mrs. Gloria Duwong from The Weekenders was obviously pregnant for just about the entire series.
